By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.
I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth
(Song of Solomon 3:1-2)
The Holy Spirit, out of compassion for our weakness, comes to us even when we are impure. And if only He finds our intellect truly praying to Him, He enters it and puts to flight the whole array of thoughts and ideas circling within it, and He arouses it to a longing for spiritual prayer.
(Evagrios the Solitary: On Prayer 63)
Because the vision of Christ is the splendour of eternal glory, the radiance of eternal light and the mirror without stain, look upon that mirror each day, O queen and spouse of Jesus Christ, and continually study your countenance within it, so that you may clothe yourself inside and out with beautiful robes and cover yourself with the flowers and garments of all the virtues.
(St Clare of Assisi to St Agnes of Prague)
So, what is contemplative prayer and against whom does it need to be defended? I shall begin by drawing a distinction between pop contemplative prayer (PCP) and orthodox contemplative prayer (OCP). Almost all of the bandwidth used up in public discourse on the subject involves the (mostly) theologically liberal proponents of PCP and the (mostly) evangelical critics of the same. Meanwhile OCP carries on being what it has always been, a small current within the wider Christian stream quietly drawing down a disproportionately large number of blessings upon the Church and the world. Unfortunately because none of those involved in the PCP wars differentiates between the P and the O but simply refer to a generic ‘contemplative prayer’ then OCP becomes collateral damage, suffering by association with the errors contained within the whole PCP discourse.
In this essay then I propose to mention some of the things that contemplative prayer is not, and also some of the things that it is, and finally mention why it’s so totally awesome that we need more not less of it. Always provided that it is theologically orthodox.
Contemplative prayer is not an emptying of the mind for the sake of emptiness (I will explain that awkward phrasing in due course). Nor is it the application of discursive reasoning to a particular passage of Scripture or to a concept (although that is an excellent exercise in its own right). It is not syncretic. PCP began to emerge at about the time that first the Beatniks and then the Hippies started travelling East for spiritual enlightenment from the gurus and lamas. Many of the ideas to be found within it bear all the appearance of having been directly lifted from Hindu or Buddhist meditation as modified by New Age or therapeutic Western culture. By contrast OCP emerged in the early Christian centuries with no such connections.
An historical digression. Some PCP proponents point to the Desert Fathers of the 4th century as an inspiration to them. Which is highly debatable given the stark contrast between the writings of such Fathers and the writings of their supposed descendants. Be that as it may, some critics of PCP accept this claim and proceed to argue, in the absence of any evidence, that such Fathers were also syncretistic and, anyway, the Church was already descending into apostasy at this point. However, if the Fathers did draw on a regional precedent for what they did, and again there is no evidence that they did, it could only have been from the Jewish communities described by Philo of Alexandria, a near-contemporary of Jesus, in his work ‘On the Contemplative Life’. Moreover the first biographer of the first great Desert Father, St Antony the Great, was St Athanasius who is also probably the GOAT among defenders of Christian orthodoxy routing the nearly victorious heresy of Arianism and arguing for an understanding of the Trinity which is still used by practically all the denominations of the Reformation tradition as well as the Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox. Apostasy forsooth.
Returning from my digression. Another thing that Contemplative Prayer (OCP) is not is exclusively Catholic. Of course Catholics do it better than anyone else but it is to be found also within the Eastern Orthodox tradition. I mentioned the writings of the Desert Fathers earlier and one resource you could turn to is Volume One of ‘The Philokalia’ translated by Palmer, Sherrard and Ware which contains monastic writings on prayer from before the schism between the Latin and Byzantine traditions. There have also been Protestant contemplatives such as Jacob Boehme and William Law. Some Quakers, especially during their quietist period of the eighteenth century, also practised this form. And more recently the post-World War Two Taizé community has contemplated with the aid of chant. Moreover the nominally Catholic Madame Guyon, a mystic of the late seventeenth early eighteenth century, has always been way more popular with Protestants than with Catholics.
To understand what contemplative prayer is we need first of all to think about sex. And especially we need to think about its supreme form, which is monogamous marriage between one man and one woman. Traditionally in Catholic writing the soul is always gendered as ‘she’ regardless of the sex of the person to whom it belongs. The reason for this is that the purpose of the Christian soul is to be united as a bride to the bridegroom Christ, as a Lover to the Beloved. In contemplative writing this marriage theme appears again and again and in mediaeval times especially produced a good deal of commentary on the Song of Songs, which is the Song of Solomon, most famously by St Bernard of Clairvaux. This, of course, is a thoroughly biblical concept. In Ephesians 5 Christ and His Church are described as Groom and Bride respectively and what applies to the whole also applies to the part. So the individual soul (‘she’) is to become one thing with her husband. Or, as St Julian of Norwich put it “The soul is preciously knitted to Him in its making by a knot so subtle and so mighty that it is oned into God. In this oneing, it is made endlessly holy.“
So, once you have stopped thinking about sex what do you do next? Well, the word ‘contemplation’ implies an attentive consideration of something outside of oneself. It is a looking-at not a thinking-about. A lover looks at her beloved, a bride looks at her groom (ideally at least). And, a Christian looks at Christ. St Josemaria Escriva wrote Only if we watch and contemplate the heart of Jesus will we ensure that our heart is freed from hatred and indifference. And St Paul wrote “It is given to us, all alike, to catch the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, with faces unveiled; and so we become transfigured into the same likeness, borrowing glory from that glory, as the Spirit of the Lord enables us.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)
Contemplative Prayer, then, is a practice whereby we look towards God and only God. Since humans cannot look at abstractions and since Christ became our Emmanuel, God-with-us, what this means above all is a steady looking towards Christ and especially towards Christ Crucified. This is where we get to the emptying the mind stage of proceedings so beloved of the PCP advocates and critics. As quoted at the beginning of this essay Evagius writes about the mind being distracted by the whole array of thoughts and ideas circling within it and the Holy Spirit putting them to flight. In orthodox contemplative prayer the intention is, so far as possible, to leave behind all the multiplicity of things with which the mind is usually filled and replace it with ‘the one thing necessary’ which is Christ alone. And only through the power of the Holy Spirit can this be accomplished. All that the pray-er can do is to prepare the ground and wait.
In the age of faith spiritual writers talked about three stages to Contemplation- Purgation, Illumination, and Union. What they took for granted and didn’t mention is a necessary preliminary stage which in an age of faithlessness we need to draw attention to. Conversion. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. When we are convicted of sin, when we realise our need for salvation, when we see Redemption coming only through the Precious Blood of Christ only then can we begin contemplative prayer. Not all the saved will pursue this path, it is not necessary for salvation only for a particular form of spiritual growth to which some are called but not others. All those who contemplate in a Christian way must necessarily first be converted. Contemplation without conversion, without grace through faith and not through works, is so much wasted time. The converted non-contemplator is infinitely better off than the non-converted contemplator.
How do we set about actually doing this contemplation thing? Interestingly the most contemplative of all the contemplative monastic orders in the Catholic Church, the Carthusians, does not prescribe any single way for its monks to follow. It recognises that there is no technique which by itself can raise us up to the heights, we must be lifted up by the Lord Himself. And the means by which we make ourselves available to him will be as varied as the distinct and unique personalities which He has given us for His own good purposes. We must look towards Him and wait, and just how we do that depends on just how our mind and heart function and how He responds depends on Him entirely.
What’s the point? Why contemplate if it doesn’t contribute to our salvation? Well, we might as well ask why we should clothe the naked, heal the sick and visit the prisoner if all we need is a faith born out of conversion. Each member of the Body of Christ has a particular calling through which their faith is made present in the world and by which their sanctification, their growth in holiness, can occur. Those called to contemplation have the vocation of experiencing eternity while still in time, this enables them to bear witness to the beauty of God and to pray unceasingly in an intercessory way for all the other members of the Body.
Wait, what? ‘Experiencing eternity while still in time’? Let me unpack that a bit. Eternity isn’t a period of time that we enter into after death. It is an eternal present which, by definition, is everywhere all the time. The Catholic conceptualisation of eternity in heaven is often expressed through the idea of the Beatific Vision which is an immediate, direct knowledge of God which the angels experience always, as will the saints when their earthly life is ended. What the contemplative is waiting for is a glimpse of that Vision which the Spirit sometimes grants to those who patiently wait. And, although this is a visual, sensory metaphor contemplatives generally seek to avoid anything resembling a gross sensory experience, what they seek is a vision unseen to the eyes but only perceived in the individual human spirit whenever it is raised, by grace through faith, to the presence of the majestic Triune God. May He be blessed forever. Amen.
The painting is The Hermit (1670) by Gerrit Dou. It displays each of the elements associated with the idea of contemplative prayer in the pre-PCP world. A skull to remind the pray-er of death and judgement, the Scriptures from which to learn from whence comes redemption, and Christ Crucified as the source and destination of our salvation.
thoughtfully catholic 